Hey everyone, this is a report about the fees on Lightning Network which I´m aiming to put out every 1-2 month.

The info comes from the publicly available data from the Lightning Gossip Network and can be used by newbies that are only just setting up their Lightning nodes and have no idea what fees to set or for LN geeks that are just interested in seeing how the fee market is evolving. All feedback is welcome!

Here goes:

BaseFee:

33.85% of channel participants have set their baseFee to 0, which is a 3.5% higher than at the last report at the start of February. Drop the base everyone with #zerobasefee https://ln.rene-pickhardt.de/

10.75 % of channel participants have their baseFee higher than 0 but below 1000, (-6% drop from the previous report)

47.52 % of channel participants have their baseFee at 1000 miliSats. (-1% decrease)

7.54 % of channel participants have set a baseFee over 1000 miliSats. (4% increase)

feeRate:

1 PPM (part per million) or lower is the fee set by the bottom 25% of channel participants.

20 PPM (part per million) is the network feeRate median. This means that half of channel participants have a fee lower or equal to this, while the other half of them have it set higher. (Last report the median was at 25 PPM, so it seems the network is getting cheaper!)

220 PPM (part per million) If you want to be in top 25% most expensive routes, then this is the feeRate you are looking for.

999 PPM (part per million) : the top 10% channel participants are charging this for routing, which is effectively 0.1% fee on the total routed amount of Sats. Pricey!

6.46 % of channel participants have set their feeRate to 0 (15% increase, impressive!)

53.79 % of channel participants have a feeRate above 0 but below 100 PPM. Basically unchanged.

11.14 % of channel participants have a feeRate between 100 and 199 PPM. Basically unchanged.

8.11 % of channel participants have a feeRate between 200 and 299 PPM. Unchanged

6.45 % of channel participants have a feeRate between 300 and 499 PPM. Things are getting pricey in this band.

2.76 % of channel participants have a feeRate between 500 and 750 PPM. !

11.14 % of channel participants have a feeRate over 750 PPM! This is a 8% decrease compared to last month!

Channel Capacity:

215K Sats or less represent the bottom 25% of channels when ordered by capacity. 7% up compared to the last report

1,000,000 Sats (10 mB or 1 Million Sats) is the median, meaning that 50% of channels are either smaller or equal to this size while the other 50% of channels on the network are larger. I think if you want to operate a routing note and you have limited capacity, this is a great size to start with, right down the middle.

3 million Sats is capacity size of the top 25% of channels on the network. Above that number and you are in the major leagues!

And finally… A very very important metric

Zero Fee Routing Rate:

This is the number of channel participants that have set both their baseFee and their feeRate to 0, thus making routing through their channels completely free!

The percentage of channel participants with this altruistic behavior is …5.54 %! This is actually 18% higher than in the previous report! Hopefully this trend continues to move up with time.

All in all, I'm happily surprised to see the network fees going down while channel capacity has slightly gone up. And it is fantastic to see that we broke 5% for number of channel participants, charging 0 fees

Catch you all later in a few months!

*All data comes from my lightning node